“SEO is a marketing function for sure, but it needs to be baked into a product, not slapped on like icing after the cake is baked.”

Duane Forrester

Facebook’s Social Graph Pushes the Envelope

Before I get into Facebook’s newest feature, Social Graph and Graph Search, let me say that Blog.Waspit.Me is not a news source. We do not offer breaking news, but rather attempt to lend advice and commentary to financial practices or social routines that are prevalent to our target market, college students. We center a majority of our posts around ways to save money and be fiscally responsible and ways to make your lifestyle more efficient. Although we usually focus on the former (because we are, at the end of the day, a financial service aimed at bettering college students’ lives), using new technologies to make everyday tasks and routines more efficient is something what really gets us excited.

And if tech efficiency gets the Waspit Team excited, you can imagine how we took the news when Facebook’s new “Social Graph” was released Tuesday afternoon. Some of the features Facebook is unveiling in their new update push the boundaries on what Internet users have only imagined up until now. “Social Graph” enables us to search the Facebook world by searching for specifics like keywords in a person’s profile, employment history, age, etc. That’s right, finding the girl you spoke to for thirty seconds at a party once just became that much easier.

This update is what Zuckerberg introduced as the “third pillar of Facebook-” pillar one was the News Feed, pillar two was the Timeline. Basically, what the social graph does is narrow down a search using information that your specific network has at its disposal. Here is an example of how this works: by using Social Graph you can figure out which venues you’ve been to, or liked, or your friends have been to, or your friends liked, or your one friend, Chris, went on a full moon (kidding but maybe). You can narrow down and filter searches any way you see fit, which we think is pretty cool.

This search is so specific that it allows you to ask questions in everyday, colloquial speech. For example, you can ask “which of my friends that live in New York like Thai food?” This makes it easier for users to search and uncover friends that have similar or dissimilar tastes; but, is that something friends want readily available and revealed?

As excited as we are about seeing how Facebook’s new updates work, it’ll also be interesting to see how well they are received. There is a difference between offering your publicly-made information to fellow users to use at their leisure and having information pulled from your activity, unknowingly, for other users to use. Thus far in Waspit’s development, we have paid close attention to how much information users want and are able to share. We have taken a lot of care in user’s privacy settings and their ability to make private information, a feature that we feel is paramount not only for a financial service but also a social platform. Facebook’s new “social graph,” as intriguing as it may be, will continue to push the boundaries of its current users. Here is what Facebook had to say about it: Graph Search

SEO and SEM are not competing services. SEO is considered a subset of SEM services. Today, if you want to conduct business on the Internet you need to be visible in both organic and advertised links, which means you need both SEO and SEM.

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